by C. M. Sutter
“Okay, good. I’m sure Hope will do that,” Diane said.
I cocked my head. “You’re sure she’ll do that? Then, why isn’t she here?”
Diane and Mike both went silent, and I returned my attention to the footage.
“She has to be alone. She isn’t looking back at the car. I don’t see shadows of movement along the driveway, and her mouth isn’t moving, meaning she isn’t talking to anyone. I will admit, she does look distraught, but that could be one of two reasons. She regrets bailing on the others and possibly forgot that the camera caught her image by the front door until it was too late—”
“Or?” Mike asked.
“Or she’s more afraid of them than she is of the law.”
Chapter 16
“Excuse me. I have to make a call.” Renz stepped out of the Danielses’ home office while I reviewed the footage one more time.
“Where do you think she went from here?” I looked from Mike to Diane and waited for an answer.
“Maybe to her apartment since she’d be passing here on the way,” Diane said.
I gave that some thought. If Hope had been with Leon in Rapid City and left, she would be heading northwest then due west on I-90, passing through Gillette on her way to Buffalo. Maybe she just wanted to see her parents before continuing on but changed her mind because of the time of night.
Renz rejoined us in the office. “I was checking on the BOLO for Hope’s car. Nothing has come in as of yet.”
“There’s a good chance it’s at her duplex, and don’t forget, this footage is seven hours old.” I turned to Diane. “Does Hope have a garage there?”
“She does.”
“Okay, then, it looks like we’re heading to Buffalo now instead of later. I’ll call the local police department and have them do a welfare check at the duplex.” I made the call and was told we would hear back within a half hour.
“We’re going along,” Mike said.
Renz held up his hands. “Mr. Daniels, this is an FBI investigation and we can’t have you and your wife getting in the middle of that. We’ll keep you posted, and I’ll call you the second we hear about the welfare check, but right now, we have to go. Before we leave, do you have a key to the duplex?”
Mike shook his head. “No, but you have our permission to enter if you feel the need.”
We rushed back to the hotel, packed our go bags, and checked out. Buffalo was an hour away, but because it was such a small town, I was certain we would hear back about the welfare check relatively soon.
I gave Renz a glance once he’d merged onto the interstate. “So, just between you and me, what do you think is going on?”
Renz shrugged. “Not sure, Jade, but either Hope is planning something with Leon and Gary, and stopping at her folks house was just some kind of distraction, or she’s going against the guys, which could put her in a very dangerous position.”
My phone rang fifteen minutes into our drive. The screen showed that Buffalo Police Chief Roger Worth was calling. I tapped the speakerphone icon and answered. “Agent Monroe speaking.”
“Agent Monroe, it’s Chief Worth calling about the welfare check.”
“Sure thing, Chief. What did your officers find?”
“They rang the bell a number of times, but nobody answered, so they left.”
“Okay, we’ll be there in about forty-five minutes. The parents gave us permission to enter if we felt it was necessary. We’ll keep you updated.” I ended the call, sat back, and pulled in a deep breath. We couldn’t do anything until we got there, and I had the feeling we would be entering that duplex anyway, locked or not.
It was after eleven when we finally reached the duplex. Renz parked at the curb. I grabbed gloves from my go bag and jammed them into my pocket, then we got out.
“Apparently, Hope and Claire live in the lower unit.” I craned my neck around the house to the end of the driveway. Two single-car garages sat in the back, and an extra concrete parking slab was off to the side. “I guess one car gets the garage, and the other parks outside.”
Renz followed my eyes. “Which one is their garage?”
“I don’t know, but we can ask the upstairs neighbors. Let’s see if we can rattle anyone’s cage downstairs first.”
We walked to the porch, where there were two doors, one for the lower apartment and one for the upper. I pressed the bell for the lower, waited, and pressed it again. Nobody answered.
I spun my index finger. “Let’s do a walk around. Maybe we’ll get lucky enough to see in some windows.”
We walked the driveway along the side of the house but found only one first-floor window, and it was too high to see into. Near the rear of the house were two numbered doors—one and two. Renz turned the knob on door number one. It was locked.
“Which do you think is the easiest to get into, the front door or this one?”
“This one for sure.” He grinned. “But I forgot my lock-picking tools.” He gave the door a hard kick and broke it from the hinges. “Why don’t you run around to the front, ring the bell for the upstairs tenants, and let them know we aren’t burglars. Ask about the garages too.”
“On it.” I headed to the front porch and rang the bell twice before the tenant came down.
“What was that noise? Can I help you?”
“Yes.” I pulled out my badge and showed the very-pregnant lady my ID. “Sorry about that crashing sound, but my partner had to get inside the lower unit. Have you seen anyone here in the last eight hours?”
“No, but of course I was asleep until two hours ago.”
“Right. So nothing woke you in the middle of the night?”
“No.”
“Have you seen Hope or Claire lately?”
“No, neither of them.”
“Okay, thanks. Which garage belongs to the lower unit?”
“The one on the left.”
“Great. Thank you.”
The woman closed the door just as Renz opened the door to Hope’s unit.
I crossed the threshold and joined him inside. “Is anyone in here?” I yelled.
“I’ve already called out her name but didn’t get a response. Let’s search the rooms to see if anything would lead us to believe Hope was here last night.”
Renz and I gloved up and began in the kitchen. We would clear the duplex side by side since we didn’t want to miss anything that could be considered a clue of their plans, their whereabouts, or if Hope had actually been there at all.
I opened the cabinet door under the sink and pulled out the trash can. Garbage cans were usually the first thing I checked as far as kitchen items, and often times, they held valuable evidence. “That’s weird. The only thing in here is an empty milk carton.” I pulled the carton from the can to take a closer look. I opened it and turned it upside down over the sink. A half teaspoon or so of curdled milk dripped out. I looked at the expiration date—two weeks prior. “If Hope or Claire tossed this carton before they disappeared, there sure as hell wouldn’t be any liquid left in it. It would have dried up or evaporated by now.”
Renz took a peek at the spot of curdled milk in the sink. “Good point.” He walked to the refrigerator and opened it. “Nothing left inside, so obviously nobody has been here for any length of time. That’s if either of them actually came back.”
I shrugged. “Well, somebody put the carton in the trash, and I think we should have it printed.” I opened other cabinets until I found saved plastic grocery bags. I dropped the milk carton in one, and we continued our search. Nothing else appeared suspicious or questionable in the kitchen. We moved on to the living room, lifted the sofa cushions, looked under the couch and in the coat closet, and opened the TV cabinet doors and drawers—nothing. I turned on the hall light and continued on. It looked like a linen closet, the bathroom, and two bedrooms were the only rooms down that way. Renz passed me and entered the bathroom as I opened the linen closet. I felt between the towels and sheets but didn’t find anything hidden there.
<
br /> “How’s it look in the bathroom?” I continued on.
“So far it’s just the usual hair products, toothpaste, and shower supplies.”
I stopped in my tracks when I glanced at the open door. “Renz?”
“Yep.”
“I think this is blood.”
He spun and looked at what I was pointing to. Renz came closer. “There isn’t much, and it actually looks like a smear, but I think you’re right.”
“Like somebody tried to wipe it off with a tissue or something?”
“I’d say so.” Renz checked the garbage can. “Nothing in the trash, so whatever was used to wipe it off probably got flushed.”
“We need to know if that’s Hope’s blood, and it’ll tell us plenty if it is.”
“I agree. What county are we in?”
I shook my head. “Hell if I know. Let me check on my phone.” I typed the question into the search bar, and Johnson County came up, but it showed that they didn’t have their own forensic lab. My next question was where the state crime lab was located, and the results showed Cheyenne, a four-hour drive away. “Damn it. The state crime lab is in Cheyenne. How are we going to do this?”
Renz rubbed his forehead. “First, we’d need a sample of Hope’s DNA, then we’d have to collect some of that blood.”
I looked around. “Okay, we are in her bathroom. If any of Hope’s DNA is in this house, it should be in here.” I pulled open drawers and found hair clips, brushes, and curling irons, all with strands of dark hair tangled in them. “These have to belong to Hope since Claire is a blonde.”
“Then bag all of that stuff. Now we have to get blood samples off that door.”
“Swabs would work, right?”
“Yeah, but the blood is dry. Maybe a tiny bit of water on them? I’m not sure what’ll work, Jade, I’m kind of going in blind.”
“Let’s call Taft. She can have someone at our crime lab walk us through collecting the sample.”
Renz made the call and was told a dry sample was more viable than a wet one. That was good news for us, but we still didn’t know how well our efforts would work. I found a box of sandwich bags in the kitchen, pulled one out, and after Renz used swabs to rub all the blood off the door and onto the cotton-tipped end, he dropped them into the bag and sealed it.
I let out a long breath. “That’s the best we can do. Now we have to arrange a quick way to transport these samples to the crime lab. What we need is a helicopter.”
“I’ll call the Buffalo police chief and see what he suggests,” Renz said.
Meanwhile, I walked through the house to the back door and checked the damages. The door was cracked at the hinges with no way to secure it to the framework.
Shit. We can’t leave the door like this.
I called Hope’s mom, told her that nobody was at the duplex, and asked who owned the building. Diane put me on hold while she looked for the rental agreement. Minutes later, she was back on the phone with a name and a phone number. I grabbed a napkin off the counter and a pen from the kitchen’s junk drawer and wrote down what she said.
“Agent Monroe, are you going to find Hope?”
“Mrs. Daniels, we aren’t sure Hope was even here, but I promise to keep you posted with any relevant news.” I thanked her, hung up, and made the call to the property owner. The man who owned the duplex said he would be there in ten minutes. I apologized for our intrusion and explained that we had a life-or-death reason for seeing if anyone was inside. I hung up and returned to the bathroom, where Renz was still talking on the phone. He lifted his index finger as if to say he was almost done.
I gave him a nod then entered the bedroom on the right. I wasn’t sure whose room it was, so I began by looking in the nightstand drawer. I saw a spiral notebook inside, essentially a journal, although not a secure one. The pages were filled with daily entries going back a year. By scanning the first few pages, it was obvious that I was in Claire’s room. She spoke of Gary and how she couldn’t wait until his release date. They could make plans to be together without interference from her parents anymore. She was an adult and had the legal ability to call her own shots. I flipped to the last entry, which only said it was the day Gary was being released from prison. He had big ideas to share that would get her permanently out from under her parents’ control. I closed the notebook with plans to take it along. I would read it later in its entirety. I continued on to the last bedroom when I heard a man’s voice call out. It had to be the homeowner.
Renz stopped me in the hallway. “Who’s here?”
“Probably the man who owns the duplex. I called him.”
“Okay, I’ll take care of it. Go ahead and finish that last bedroom, and I’ll update you after I straighten things out with the homeowner about the door.”
I walked Hope’s bedroom, checked her dresser drawers, then opened her closet. I frowned as I stared at several pieces of luggage scattered across the closet floor. They were meant to fit into each other like Russian nesting dolls, yet the largest and likely most used piece was missing.
Hmm… maybe that’s the one she took with her.
I didn’t find anything of value to our investigation in her room and walked out. Renz and the homeowner were just ending their conversation, with Renz handing him his business card. “Get a quote from your insurance company, and the FBI will take care of the replacement cost. My email address is on the card, so send me the quote, and we’ll make it right.”
The owner said he would get some plywood to temporarily secure the door, then he left.
“So, now what? We wait for him to come back?” I asked.
Renz sighed. “I guess. I’m waiting on the chief to call back with news of a helicopter that might be available for us. He said the sheriff’s office has plenty of connections.”
I took a seat on the couch and opened Claire’s journal.
“What’s that?”
“A daily journal I found in Claire’s room. It ends on the day Gary got out of prison, so unless I read the entire thing, we won’t know if plans were made before his release date.”
“Go ahead and see what you can glean from it. I’m going to call Maureen. She has to arrange for local FBI units to be put on both apartments. This investigation is dragging on too long, and I feel like our hands are tied to a degree. If that blood sample is confirmed to be Hope’s, then she may be in trouble too.” Renz walked out the front door and made the call while I began paging through Claire’s diary.
Chapter 17
Hours earlier, Leon had pulled Hope’s car into the storage garage in Casper. It would stay there for the time being along with Claire’s car. After being wiped down, just in case, the beater had been abandoned a few blocks from the duplex. The local police would never connect that car to Leon since it was a piece of junk, likely uninsured, and had been stolen a month earlier.
They had already arrived in Central City and were waiting on Charlie to give them the okay to drop off Hope. She’d been sitting in the back of the box truck for hours, tied, taped up, and awaiting her fate for being disloyal to the group by going off on her own. Her car could have been spotted, and she was damn lucky it hadn’t, but Gary wasn’t about to change his mind. They were getting rid of Hope—she was a loose cannon who he wasn’t about to let ruin their enterprise.
Leon looked back at Hope, who sat against the wall. “Doing okay?”
She grunted something inaudible through the tape.
Gary spoke up. “Ignore her. She had her chance, and she screwed it up. If Claire pulls any shit, she’ll be sold too.” Gary jerked his chin toward the Gold Nugget Café. It stood several buildings in front of them and across the street. “Go pick us up some food. Get Hope a sandwich and a bottle of water. It’ll hold her over until Charlie takes her off our hands.”
Leon climbed out of the truck and walked away.
Gary looked out the windows at the street and sidewalks surrounding the parked truck, and everything appeared normal. He climbed int
o the back and sat against the opposite wall facing Hope. “Regret your stupidity yet?”
She stared at the floor.
“Humph… nothing to say? Well, that’s too bad. You’re nothing but a spoiled brat and a liability anyway. You wondering what Charlie’s going to do with you? You aren’t worth nearly as much as a sixteen-year-old.” Gary’s one-sided conversation was interrupted by Leon’s return.
Leon opened the passenger-side door and set the bag on the seat along with the bottles of water while he climbed in.
Gary entered the truck’s cab through the opening and sat behind the wheel. “Hope you got something good. I’m starving.”
Leon passed two sandwiches and an order of chips to Gary, then climbed into the back.
“Where the hell are you going?”
“To give Hope her food.”
“Get back up here and eat. You can give it to her after you’re done. What if she starts yelling the second you pull the tape off her mouth? I’m going to be back there to make sure that doesn’t happen but not before I enjoy my lunch. Now sit down.”
Leon did as he was told, and seconds later, Gary’s phone rang.
“Damn it. I hope Charlie doesn’t intend to screw up my meal.” He answered and set his phone to Speaker as he took a bite of the first turkey club. “Gary speaking.”
“It’s Charlie. Meet me at that abandoned subdivision behind my property. Be there in a half hour.” The phone went dead. Gary checked the time then nodded to Leon. “Go ahead and give her some food. Who knows when she’ll eat again.” Gary jerked his head toward the back. “Feed her, but don’t untie her. I’ll start heading to Charlie’s place.”
Gary heard Leon giving Hope instructions only four feet from his back.
“I’m going to pull the tape off your mouth so you can eat. Please don’t do anything stupid, Hope.”
That few seconds of silence turned into an ear piercing shitstorm of noise. With the tape off her mouth, Hope screamed, pleaded, and spewed out hatred for Gary. “Help me, Leon. Don’t let that son of a bitch sell me, please! Who knows what’ll happen—I could die. Protect me. Help me!”
